To Live
by DougS
Summary: Not long after he is released from his capsule, Dr. Cain invites X to get his worries out of his system by recording his thoughts. Brief one-shot.


--- X MEMORY JOURNAL RECORDING 1.0 – DATE 11.03.2119 ---

Dr. Cain thinks I worry too much. He says I might find some peace in recording my thoughts and reviewing the things on my mind. I think he'd like to know more about what goes on my head, too, but he'd never feel comfortable asking me outright. He's always curious about me, but he doesn't like to pry.

So, where do I begin?

I was born an adult. Most people get to develop and grow and adjust to the world around them. I never did, but then again, I'm not really a "person," I suppose.

I awoke from my chamber completely aware of my own artificiality. My creator, Dr. Thomas Light, instilled in me the ability to think, reason and even make moral decisions with the same independence enjoyed by human beings.

He's dead now. I never actually knew him.

I understand that he considered me dangerous. He had a warning declaring as such right on the pod that I was sleeping in, the place I spent the first few decades of my existence. If you want to call a semi-permanent state of sleep "existence." I think it's debatable.

Anyway, Dr. Light thought I was too dangerous for his world. Yet he didn't destroy me. What does that say about him? Instead, he locked me away without fully finished me so that I might wake up in a future world, a world that was hopefully ready for my existence.

My own creator was afraid of me, labeled me as dangerous and hid me away for decades because of what I was capable of. What does that say about _me_?

He was afraid because of my independence. In essence, he made me a blank slate. Previous robots from his own lifetime were born with some sort of innate drive to them — though ostensibly self-aware and capable of their own decisions, they had innate ideas programmed into most of them about what was right and wrong. Me? I had to form those ideas for myself.

So what's it like to be a robot who's innately self-aware of his own uniqueness, a robot who can worry over every decision as much as a human? It kind of feels like a sick joke. Who programs a robot to be so self-aware of his own artificial nature while also weighing him down with moral dilemmas?

I spend much of my time "hunting Mavericks." Basically a polite way of saying that I kill my own kind for a living.

Of course, the humans argue that we can't be "killed." Robots can be "destroyed," of course, but not _killed_. Right? When I'm in the middle of a firefight and I'm barely clinging to existence, that's sure as hell not how I see it. I feel afraid to lose everything I am. I think it comes with the self-awareness. Like I said – a sick joke.

I get all the hopes and fears of a human being, but I'm not one. They can comfort themselves with ideas about an afterlife. They can talk about "souls." I can't. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there's nothing more to my internal thoughts than programming, no matter how I feel about that.

When I'm not "hunting Mavericks," I take a lot of time to study nature. I wonder what separates me from it. I hope to myself that I could be considered a form of life — _real_ life, not just some construct that the humans made.

I wonder what Dr. Light meant for me. He obviously knew that I was going to need to fight _something_. Could he have known what it would be?

You know, the Mavericks… the robots that go bad… they're really my fault. I tried to blame Dr. Light, and even Dr. Cain. But I helped Dr. Cain build the first "reploid." I helped create these robots that could think and decide and feel like me. And why? So I wouldn't be alone. Selfish. Stupid. Many of them used their independence to assert themselves above humanity – to rebel and "go Maverick." So I stepped in, and that's how I wound up killing — sorry, "destroying" the brothers and sisters I helped give birth to.

Funny. I never thought it would become a full-time job.

I'm tired. Not sure how I get "tired." There's a lot about me we still don't understand. That's probably the number-one reason we shouldn't have tried to replicate my design. Don't mess with what you don't understand. People have written so many books about that rule, yet somehow they never seem to follow it. And obviously, I'm not any better at learning from human history.

Maybe that's the most human thing about me — my disastrous mistakes.

----- RECORD ENDS -----


End file.
